Tag Archives: internal capital models

In an opinion piece in the FT in 2008, Alan Greenspan stated that any risk model is “an abstraction from the full detail of the real world”. He talked about never being able to anticipate discontinuities in financial markets, unknown unknowns if you like. It is therefore depressing to see articles talk about the “VaR shock” that resulted in the Swissie from the decision of the Swiss National Bank (SNB) to lift the cap on its FX rate on the 15th of January (examples here from the Economist and here in the FTAlphaVille). If traders and banks are parameterising their models from periods of unrepresentative low volatility or from periods when artificial central bank caps are in place, then I worry that they are not even adequately considering known unknowns, let alone unknown unknowns. Have we learned nothing?

Of course, anybody with a brain knows (that excludes traders and bankers then!) of the weaknesses in the value-at-risk measure so beloved in modern risk management (see Nassim Taleb and Barry Schachter quotes from the mid 1990s on Quotes page). I tend to agree with David Einhorn when, in 2008, he compared the metric as being like “an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident“. A piece in the New York Times by Joe Nocera from 2009 is worth a read to remind oneself of the sad topic.

This brings me to the insurance sector. European insurance regulation is moving rapidly towards risk based capital with VaR and T-VaR at its heart. Solvency II calibrates capital at 99.5% VaR whilst the Swiss Solvency Test is at 99% T-VaR (which is approximately equal to 99.5%VaR). The specialty insurance and reinsurance sector is currently going through a frenzy of deals due to pricing and over-capitalisation pressures. The recently announced Partner/AXIS deal follows hot on the heels of XL/Catlin and RenRe/Platinum merger announcements. Indeed, it’s beginning to look like the closing hours of a swinger’s party with a grab for the bowl of keys! Despite the trend being unattractive to investors, it highlights the need to take out capacity and overhead expenses for the sector.

I have posted previously on the impact of reduced pricing on risk profiles, shifting and fattening distributions. The graphic below is the result of an exercise in trying to reflect where I think the market is going for some businesses in the market today. Taking previously published distributions (as per this post), I estimated a “base” profile (I prefer them with profits and losses left to right) of a phantom specialty re/insurer. To illustrate the impact of the current market conditions, I then fattened the tail to account for the dilution of terms and conditions (effectively reducing risk adjusted premia further without having a visible impact on profits in a low loss environment). I also added risks outside of the 99.5%VaR/99%T-VaR regulatory levels whilst increasing the profit profile to reflect an increase in risk appetite to reflect pressures to maintain target profits. This resulted in a decrease in expected profit of approx. 20% and an increase in the 99.5%VaR and 99.5%T-VaR of 45% and 50% respectively. The impact on ROEs (being expected profit divided by capital at 99.5%VaR or T-VaR) shows that a headline 15% can quickly deteriorate to a 7-8% due to loosening of T&Cs and the addition of some tail risk.

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For what it is worth, T-VaR (despite its shortfalls) is my preferred metric over VaR given its relative superior measurement of tail risk and the 99.5%T-VaR is where I would prefer to analyse firms to take account of accumulating downside risks.

The above exercise reflects where I suspect the market is headed through 2015 and into 2016 (more risky profiles, lower operating ROEs). As Solvency II will come in from 2016, introducing the deeply flawed VaR metric at this stage in the market may prove to be inappropriate timing, especially if too much reliance is placed upon VaR models by investors and regulators. The “full detail of the real world” today and in the future is where the focus of such stakeholders should be, with much less emphasis on what the models, calibrated on what came before, say.

Amlin reported their Q1 figures today and had some interesting comments on their reinsurance and retrocession spend that was down £50 million on the quarter (from 23% of gross premiums to 18%). Approx £20 million was due to a business line withdrawal with the remainder due to “lower rates and improved cover available on attractive terms”.

Amlin also stated “with the assistance of more sophisticated modelling, we have taken the decision to internalise a proportion of a number of programmes. Given the diversifying nature of many of our insurance classes, this has the effect of increasing mean expected profitability whilst only modestly increasing extreme tail risk.”

The use by insurers of their economic capital models for reinsurance/retrocession purchases is a trend that is only going to increase as we enter into the risk based solvency world under Solvency II. Current market conditions have resulted in reinsurers being more open to offering multi-line aggregate coverage which protect against both frequency and severity with generous exposure inclusions.

It will only be a matter of time, in my opinion, before reinsurers underwrite coverage directly based upon a insurer’s own capital model, particularly when such a model has been approved by a firm’s regulator or been given the blessing of a rating agency.

Also in the future I expect that firms will more openly disclose their operating risk profiles. There was a trend a few years ago whereby firms such as Endurance (pre- Charman) and Aspen did include net risk profiles, such as those in the graphs below, in their investor presentations and supplements (despite the bad blood in the current Endurance-Aspen hostile take-over bid, at least it’s one thing they can say they have in common!).

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Unfortunately, it was a trend that did not catch on and was quickly discontinued by those firms. If insurers and reinsurers are increasingly using their internal capital models in key decision making, investors will need to insist on understanding them in more detail. A first step would be more public disclosure of the results, the assumptions, and their strengths and weaknesses.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the dark knight or rather the black swan himself, said that “anything that relies on correlation is charlatanism”. I am currently reading the excellent “The signal and the noise” by Nate Silver. In Chapter 1 of the book he has a nice piece on CDOs as an example of a “catastrophic failure of prediction” where he points to certain CDO AAA tranches which were rated on an assumption of a 0.12% default rate and which eventually resulted in an actual rate of 28%, an error factor of over 200 times!.

Silver cites a simplified CDO example of 5 risks used by his friend Anil Kashyap in the University of Chicago to demonstrate the difference in default rate if the 5 risks are assumed to be totally independent and dependent. It got me thinking as to how such a simplified example could illustrate the impact of applied correlation assumptions. Correlation between core variables are critical to many financial models and are commonly used in most credit models and will be a core feature in insurance internal models (which under Solvency II will be used to calculate a firms own regulatory solvency requirements).

So I set up a simple model (all of my models are generally so) of 5 risks and looked at the impact of varying correlation from 100% to 0% (i.e. totally dependent to independent) between each risk. The model assumes a 20% probability of default for each risk and the results, based upon 250,000 simulations, are presented in the graph below. What it does show is that even at a high level of correlation (e.g. 90%) the impact is considerable.

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The graph below shows the default probabilities as a percentage of the totally dependent levels (i.e 20% for each of the 5 risks). In effect it shows the level of diversification that will result from varying correlation from 0% to 100%. It underlines how misestimating correlation can confound model results.

Disclaimer

This blog represents my personal views and is not reflective of the views or opinions held by any company or employer I work for currently or have worked for in the past. The views expressed herein are based solely upon publicly available data. No views expressed herein should be taken as an endorsement to take any particular course of action in the markets. The basis of this blog is that different views should be expressed and readers make up their own minds on the what they believe and act accordingly.